ROSÉ’s Debut Solo Album ‘Rosie’: All 12 Songs Ranked

If there’s one thing undeniable about Rosie, it is the absolute raw delivery across every track. So even as the light-hearted guitar-plucking production on “Not the Same” doesn’t quite fit the intensity with which ROSÉ is belting on the record — “Yeah, we had good days and light on our side/ But you f-cked up and you know that I’m right,” she rips through a raspy, roaring chorus — listeners still feel the authenticity through a record filled with powerfully intimate performances.

Withholding anyone whose OCD may be driven mad by Track No. 2 on Rosie being “3am” and the third track being “Two Years,” this acoustic-leaning, toxic-love singalong feels like an appropriate song to follow up the LP’s opening ballad “Number One Girl.” Thirty seconds into the music, 808s and a subtle trap beat join the production to officially send the album into a higher tempo — and deeper topics: “So can we keep the story rollin’?/ Forget that sh-t my mother always told me/ ‘Cause nothing’s really perfect like that/ I need you, really that bad.”

“Drinks or Coffee” highlights the range of complexities explored across Rosie. Taken at face value, many of the lyrics could come off as hypocritical or confused 27-year-old, but instead, speak to the many movements and changes one goes through in one’s twenties. Over the snappiest beat on the record, she coos, “I’m feelin’ so good at a bad party/ We don’t have to talk, I know that you want me/ Gotta keep it nice, we cannot be naughty/ We could get drinks or we could get coffee.” Meeting a potential flame over drinks or for coffee tends to have implicit differences and expectations — but also doesn’t need to — with ROSÉ sounding like she’s having fun playing around with the different combinations of connection.

While roses have naturally been a flower attached to Ms. Roseanne Park since fans met her at debut, our girl is using her signature floral to symbolize the end of a relationship. “In the desert of us, all our tears turned to dust/ Now the roses don’t grow here/ I guess that love does what it wants/ And that’s just too bad for us.” The penultimate track of Rosie showcases a more stripped-down production that allows for greater focus on the storytelling and vocals — which feel incredibly intimate in this track with her delivery reminiscent of some records by Halsey or Diana Vickers.

Fun fact: ROSÉ wrote this track with Freddy Wexler, who helmed ROSÉ’s standout solo track “Hard to Love” from BLACKPINK’s No. 1 Billboard 200 album Born Pink. Wexler has worked with powerhouses like Celine Dion, Adam Lambert, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato and Laufey, so this reunion is more than welcome.

Despite the song’s title or being helmed by super-producer Greg Kurstin, “Dance All Night” is surprisingly chilled out. It feels like a point of resolution for ROSÉ, who isn’t shaming or punishing herself for letting heartache have too much power over her but meditating on how to move forward, do better next time, and instead choose to live in the moment: “When the morning comes, just promise me you’ll stay forever young…/ I would dance all night/ Not care about the heartache in my life/ Oh-oh-oh and I would not obsess/ Over all the things I don’t regret/ I’d dance all night.”

Whether or not it was an intentional shoutout in the lyrics, we’ll never be mad at being reminded of BLACKPINK’s banger b-side “Forever Young,” which has become a favorite for the K-pop group’s closing songs or encores during concerts.

By the third track in “Two Years,” listeners are fully immersed in Rosie and ready to welcome all the new sides the BLACKPINK star shares on the LP. ’80s-inspired synths revved us into a new soundscape as ROSÉ experiments with different vocal effects and echoes throughout this subtle, bittersweet synth-pop song. Fans of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department album will dig this one.

Infusing some refreshing rhythmic production into the mix, “Gameboy” stands out as one of the catchiest cuts on the album (the repetitious “break” hook that closes out each chorus) and some clever lyrics to hint ROSÉ may be a bit of a gamer (“If loving you was a jump, yeah, I probably died a hundred-ten times”).

We could easily imagine this song as a single off Rosie with the perfect groundwork already laid for a feature in a remix with a potential rapper or fellow crooner defending himself as the accused “Gameboy”?

Amid the immediate and ongoing success of her and Bruno Mars’ “APT.” collaboration, ROSÉ gave the next taste of her solo album, providing a more precise direction for the LP a month later. Dropped on Nov. 22, the stripped-down, stark-yet-grandiose piano ballad, “Number One Girl” — also co-penned with Mars — shared characteristics of the star that fans hadn’t yet experienced. While ROSÉ had previously shared the soft rock ballad “Gone” on her 2021 solo release R, “Number One Girl” offers a more charged-up and emotional vocal performance the listener can’t ignore, not unlike how Olivia Rodrigo’s ballad “Drivers License” made her both a commercial breakout and critical darling.

One of ROSÉ’s most impressive vocal performances ever. Despite lyrics that look polite on paper (“Please, won’t you stay/ Stay a little longer, babe?”), she delivers her pleas with a lovelorn desperation that few vocalists can believably pull off (As she sings, “Don’t leave me in pieces/ Already havin’ enough trouble breathing,” you can hear her exhausted resolve). Plus, the track gets extra points for incorporating classic soulful rock production that allows the focus to stay on ROSÉ’s heartbreaking delivery.

Fans seem to be connecting with “Stay a Little Longer” as well: It’s the most-listened-to Rosie b-side on her YouTube channel by more than 700,000 streams at press time.

A central point that ROSÉ seemed keen on emphasizing when introducing Rosie was how she was involved with writing every track. “Call It the End” showcases songwriting excellence with simple but evocative lyrics whose emotional impact grows with ROSÉ’s heartfelt delivery. The brilliant chorus brings together typical relationship questions around the keyword “call”: “Do I call you my ex, or do I call you my boyfriend?/ Call you a lover, do I call you a friend? Call you the one or the one that got away? Someone I’ll just have to forget?/ Do I call you every night you’re gone or never call you again?/ Do we have a future or should I call it the end?” The song’s piano production grows more lush as the song adds in a haunting chorus, and ROSÉ’s belts grow more powerful, making one of the shortest songs on the album but also one of the most impactful.

In a year of super-strong pop releases, was any song more immediate than “APT.”? In a moment of musical brilliance for ROSÉ, the starlet used a fun Korean drinking game as the basis of a new kind of pop confection that debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and made her K-pop’s first-ever female act to crack the Top 10. As “APT.” continues pulsing through Top 40 airwaves — landing at a new peak of No. 11 on the Pop Airplay chart in its seventh week — it’s a feat in and of itself to hear the Korean word for “apartment” (apateu) used as a certified radio hit song hook broadcasted to millions who are likely are not very familiar with Korean language or culture.

Not just a combining of cultural worlds, “APT.” also blends musical styles. With an interpolation of Toni Basil’s 1982 classic jock-jam “Mickey,” which can appeal to ROSÉ’s K-pop audiences as well as general pop listeners, and Bruno Mars’ signature soul-pop crooning present across the pre-chorus and bridge, “APT.” offers something familiar but also fresh for everybody.

It’s not often that a song that touches across cultures and styles can so successfully crossover like “APT.” but when done right as ROSÉ and Mars did here, its brilliance and impact go far beyond a quick, flash hit.

In the lead-up to Rosie, the singer-songwriter used the word “toxic” frequently through interviews to describe her past relationships, living situations and the COVID pandemic to inspire different parts of the record — at one point, telling i-D magazine that even her relationship with music is toxic “because I’m obsessed with it, and sometimes it doesn’t work but I need it in my life.” While the important cultural and musical impact of “APT.” will be felt beyond its chart run, ROSÉ saving her new single “Toxic Till the End” until Rosie’s release day feels like a true expression of where this artist is today.

A whirlpool of guitars and synths set the single’s emo tone as she bluntly begins: “Call us what we are: toxic from the start,” to establish an emotional frankness that permeates throughout the cut. With a perfect power-pop production where each section swells in its intensity and instrumentation, “Toxic” delivers its knockout chorus that forces the listener to pay attention to its quick-switch lyrics: “Back then, when I was runnin’ out of your place/ I said, ‘I never wanna see your face’/ I meant: I couldn’t wait to see it again/ We were toxic ’til the end.” And it’s not just ROSÉ who’s to blame as the chorus continues: “Uh-huh, ’cause even when I said it was over/ You heard, ‘Baby can you pull me in closer?’/ You were plottin’ how to stay in my head.”

The second verse paints a more human picture of who “the ex” is (“His favorite game is chess, who would ever guess?”) alongside personal lyrics that feel uniquely ROSÉ (“I can forgive you for all of the things/ For not givin’ me back my Tiffany rings,” she snaps as a global ambassador of the jewelry brand). Despite the destructive details, “Toxic Till the End” boasts an undeniable buoyancy that gives it even more major mainstream appeal to let ROSÉ truly begin her new, more personal musical journey that steps away from her place in a group and lets her stand in her spotlight — seeping in whatever positivity, toxicity, sentiment of feeling she feels like sharing in that moment.